On what moral or philosophical basis did Keynes believe that policy advocates such as himself had either the right or the ability to manage or direct the economic interactions of multitudes of peoples in the marketplace? Keynes explained his own moral foundations in Two Memoirs, published in 1949, three years after his death. One of them, written in 1938, was on the formation of his "early beliefs" as a young man in his 20s at Cambridge University in the first decade of the 20th century.
He and many of the other young intellectuals at Cambridge had been influenced by the writings of philosopher G.E. Moore. Separate from the actual arguments made by Moore, what is of interest are the conclusions reached by Keynes from reading Moore's work. Keynes said:
"Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his [Moore's] religion was that it made morals unnecessary. Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people's of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or consequences. They consisted of timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to 'before' and 'after.'"
In this setting, traditional or established ethical or moral codes of conduct meant nothing. Said Keynes:
"We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its own merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdoms. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term immoralists. We recognized no moral obligation upon us, no inner sanction to conform or obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case."
Keynes declared that he and those like him were "left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good." Now in his mid 50s, Keynes declared in 1938, "Yet so far as I am concerned, it is too late to change. I remain, and always will remain, an immoralist." As for the social order in which he still claimed the right to act in such unrestrained ways, Keynes said that "civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilely preserved."
